I don’t know exactly what conclusions Pasteur presented to his students that day, but his experiment prompts me to think about our human adaptivity to dangerous environments, especially ones in which the toxicity has increased gradually. In America, for example, we’ve grown accustomed to public school teachers spending significant sums of their own money to buy classroom supplies, because we’ve underfunded the proposition that a decent education is a right for every kid in the country…..(Read more)
TRUMP, POPULISM, AND CHRISTIANITY
It would not be an overstatement to say the result of the 2016 Presidential Election shook the world. Defying every poll’s prediction, Donald Trump won the presidency of the United States against all odds. What seemed, at one point, a bizarre and distant experiment – like Brexit – could only happen in Europe (and we don’t really understand what’s going on in Europe anyway) actually happened in our homeland…..(Read more)
Myths Debunked: Why Did Evangelical Christians Vote for Trump?
By Myriam Renaud 
Why did a record 81% of white evangelicals vote for Donald Trump in the recent presidential election? A common explanation in the media is that these voters wanted to safeguard the empty seat on the Supreme Court with the hope of overturning Roe v. Wade. Though widely accepted, there are at least two problems with this explanation…..(Read more)
The Country Is Frighteningly Polarized. This Is Why?
By Fareed Zakaria
This is not about policy. The chasm between left and right during much of the Cold War was far wider than it is today on certain issues. Many on the left wanted to nationalize or substantially regulate whole industries; on the right, they openly advocated a total rollback of the New Deal. Compared with that, today’s economic divisions feel relatively small.
Partisanship today is more about identity…..(Read more)
Where Did ‘We the People’ Go?
By Thomas Friedman
A few days ago I was at a conference in Montreal, and a Canadian gentleman, trying to grasp what’s happening to America, asked me a simple question: “What do you fear most these days?”
I paused for a second, like a spectator waiting to see what would come out of my own mouth. Two things came out: “I fear we’re seeing the end of ‘truth’ — that we simply can’t agree any more on basic facts. And I fear that we’re becoming Sunnis and Shiites — we call them ‘Democrats’ and ‘Republicans,’ but the sectarianism that has destroyed nation-states in the Middle East is now infecting us.” (Read more)